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Different people like different things in math, but sometimes you stand in awe before a beautiful and simple, but not universally known, result that you want to share with any of your colleagues.

Do you have such an example?

Let's try to go in the direction of papers that can actually be read online or accessible with little effort, e.g. in major libraries, so that people could actually follow your advice and read about it immediately.

And as usual let's do one per post and vote freely, vote a lot.

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    $\begingroup$ Why are so many answers big-picture papers and philosophical tracts? I'm sure many of them are good papers, but is this really what the question was about? Am I right in suspecting that posters only read the title of the question and not the question itself? $\endgroup$
    – Thierry Zell
    Commented Sep 4, 2010 at 0:23
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    $\begingroup$ Agreed, as Thierry and Tobias say, there are too many recommendations for punditry. $\endgroup$
    – Robin Chapman
    Commented Nov 17, 2010 at 11:48
  • $\begingroup$ Andrew Ranicki’s site answers this question well many times over. Search engines accept site:maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick filetype:pdf. $\endgroup$
    – isomorphismes
    Commented Jan 6, 2019 at 3:02
  • $\begingroup$ By the time a user is finished reading the 43 proposed basic reads, she can come back here for further suggestions; in the meantime, the question can remain closed. However, it is a useful question and I don't see any reason to delete it. Additional attempts to delete it will be resisted. $\endgroup$
    – Mikhail Katz
    Commented Jul 30 at 7:54

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Andre Weil's "Two lectures on number theory. past and present." L'Enseignement Mathematique. Revue Internationale. fie Serie. 20: 87-110. 1974

available here http://retro.seals.ch/cntmng?type=pdf&rid=ensmat-001:1974:20::43&subp=hires

Great historical perspective on number theory up to the early 1970's. Easy to read too!

[I should remark that despite the article's great virtues, Weil is (apparently) unfair to Hardy and that many topics in number theory are left untouched.]

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    $\begingroup$ The link doesn't work for me. Anyone else got the same problem? Do you know another link to Weil's "Two lectures"? $\endgroup$
    – Konrad Voelkel
    Commented Nov 8, 2009 at 4:04
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    $\begingroup$ I think the link is broken. $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Mazel-Gee
    Commented Nov 8, 2009 at 5:08
  • $\begingroup$ It seems to be working right now. $\endgroup$
    – Jose Brox
    Commented Nov 8, 2009 at 16:48
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Cannon's beautiful and accessible paper "The combinatorial structure of cocompact discrete hyperbolic groups" was one of the original impetuses for geometric group theory. It inspired many people (including me) to become interested in infinite discrete groups. It is available here:

https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00146825

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2N Noncollinear Points Determine at Least 2N Directions, by Peter Ungar. This is a beautiful short paper that proves the result in the title.

A general remark: If you have to choose a single paper (or a single paper of a mathematician selected in other answers), I would recommend more strongy to choose original papers of important basic results rather than large survey papers or "meta" paper about mathematics. (This is also closer to the original intention of the question.)

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  • $\begingroup$ Indeed, you get correctly the original intent, though I think some reviews are original enough in their scope and composition to be considered essentially primary sources for some problems. $\endgroup$
    – Ilya Nikokoshev
    Commented Nov 30, 2009 at 15:09
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Toen's course on stacks. I don't know if this counts as a paper, but courses 2,3, and 4 introduce a really interesting approach to geometry using the functor of points approach that I've not seen before.

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I highly recommend this lucid, little book (with the length of a paper):
Mathematics: A very short introduction, by Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers

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"An Introduction to the Conjugate Gradient Method Without the Agonizing Pain" by Jonathan Shewchuk at UC Berkeley

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Carl's Pomerance "A tale of two sieves", available at

http://www.ams.org/notices/199612/pomerance.pdf

It makes a quick introduction to subexponential factoring algorithms via their development from Fermat's Algorithm and then compares the Quadratic Sieve with Her Majesty the (General) Number Field Sieve, in a thorough, appealing and very understanable manner.

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PDE as a Unified Subject by Sergiu Klainerman.
An essay on partial differential equations written by a leading expert in the field, I strongly recommend to anyone who aspires to know more on the subject as well as to those who are not interested strictly in PDE's, but would like to get a grasp of interactions between Mathematics and Physics. There are also many interesting references.

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That's easy just off the top of my head, Illya: Nets And Filters In Topology by the late Robert G. Bartle; appearing in the 1955 Volume 62 of American Mathematical Monthly. I remember having a friend in the Stanford mathematics honor society who'd published papers by age 20,but had never heard of either nets or filters. I recommended it to him right on the spot.

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  • $\begingroup$ As came up in a different question recently, this paper has some missteps. (In fact it has an erratum, albeit published 8 years later.) I agree that it is worth reading, but I would recommend also Smiley's Filters and equivalent nets, American Math. Monthly, 1957. $\endgroup$
    – Pete L. Clark
    Commented Jul 14, 2010 at 20:24
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On the theorem of Pythagoras by E.W. Dijkstra. (Did you know that in every plane triangle $\operatorname{sgn}(\alpha + \beta - \gamma) = \operatorname{sgn}(a^2 + b^2 - c^2)$, a "theorem, say, 4 times as rich [as the original]"?)

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    $\begingroup$ I don't think this is any news to most mathematicians. This is even in some good German schoolbooks from the 1960's-70's. Often when there is a statement like "if $a=b$ then $c=d$" one could check whether $a\leq b$ implies $c\leq d$, and lots of geometric inequalities have been created this way from identities. $\endgroup$
    – darij grinberg
    Commented Nov 17, 2010 at 14:08
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    $\begingroup$ Doesn't this "richer" statement follow easily from the law of cosines? $\endgroup$
    – Federico Poloni
    Commented Jul 6, 2011 at 10:23
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"Rigor and Proof in Mathematics: A Historical Perspective" by Israel Kleiner. Mathematics Magazine December 1991, 64:291-314.

This paper gives a very nice overview of how the understanding of rigor in mathematics has evolved from the early ages to the 20th century.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2690647

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